In 1968 when 911 first went live in Alabama, the infrastructure was developed and initially evolved as a “phone only” system. Based on a phone system infrastructure, the 911 system was developed around what is called a PBX (Public Branch Exchange.) A PBX is a phone system designed to share lines and route calls. During the deployment of 911, a PBX was the perfect, and most advanced technology to utilize at the time for a 911 infrastructure. An important fact to keep in mind is that the initial PBX technology that the 911 infrastructure was developed around was pre Internet, pre cell phones and pre SMS—Short Message Service (text)/MMS—Multimedia Service (photos and video clips) from cell phones. With the advancements and popularity of SMS, MMS and broadband, an outdated 911 network rendered these post 1968 technologies as Not Compatible with the 911 network.
The problem of an outdated 911 PBX technology based infrastructure, originally built to handle wireline (or landline) calls to 911, is further being compounded by fact that the volume of wireless calls to 911 continues to increase. Per the FCC, the percentage of calls to 911 from cell phones is now well over 70% nationwide. Wireless calls have now and continue to become the primary method to contact 911. Wireless calls were being handled by a call flow architecture developed in the 70's. In understanding this bit of history of the evolution of the 911 infrastructure, one begins to understand how the handling of wireless calls was retrofitted into what was a wireline only architecture. In electing to retrofit wireless calls into a wireline infrastructure, the providers of the 911 infrastructure found themselves having to revise what was rapidly becoming an outdated infrastructure in order to obtain the same type of reporting data being received for wireline calls. This was a major undertaking and took many years to accomplish.
While these reporting revisions were taking place, this retrofitting was further complicated by the fact that at the time the relatively recent phenomenon of texting (SMS), implemented in 1992, and Picture Messaging (MMS), implemented in 2002, started to trend and eventually become a very popular means of communication that are now mainstream 21st century communication tools.
Unlike wireless calls, the original 911 PBX based infrastructure (which was implemented before SMS and MMS), could not be retrofitted to handle SMS/MMS using the 70's PBX based architecture and technology. Further complicating these issues was the fact that cell phones are not tied to a physical address. Then in 2004, Qualcomm changed not being able to locate a cell phone by introducing GPS into cell phones.
This new GPS technology demanded a major overhaul in order to pull a cell phone's location. This upgrade was handled by retrofitting the pulling of a cell phone's location into an already dated 1970's 911 infrastructure. This retrofit also required the PSAPs (Public Service Answering Point) to first change their infrastructures in order to be what the FCC and Public Safety Standards Committees deemed Phase I and Phase II upgrades. These upgrades also referred to as Enhanced 911 or E911, required the carriers to begin providing information that is more precise to the PSAPs, specifically latitude and longitude of wireless callers within 50 to 300 meters of the location of the cell phone calling 911.
These advancements, still taking place today, (as with all 911 advancements), require the coordination between 7,000+public safety agencies, Standards Committees, wireless carriers, technology vendors, equipment manufacturers and local wireline carriers. This massive undertaking has already taken more than a decade and continues to be a work in progress.
Though PBX technology has evolved into an IP (Internet Protocol) based Unified Communication systems capable of handling video chat and instant messaging, etc., these evolved PBX based systems are not compatible with the rest of the 911 infrastructure. Even if a PBX based system could allow the PSAP to handle photos or videos, there remains the issue of core 911 infrastructure not being able to get a photo or video through the 911 infrastructure.
Currently emergency call centers, such as 911 facilities, typically receive emergency calls via telephone from a person reporting an emergency. The person verbally reports the emergency and the operator documents the report. The operator then calls the appropriate emergency personnel and relays the report. Unfortunately, the operator is capable of relaying very little data to the emergency personnel. The vast majority of operators cannot, for example, relay text, audio, photographic, or video files sent from the person reporting the emergency to the operator.
In some emergency situations, the telephone system that emergency call centers use is not operational. This is common when natural disasters occur. Unfortunately, when the telephone system fails, there are few other ways to communicate with emergency personnel.
In view of the foregoing problems, it would be particularly advantageous to provide a system that would facilitate communication of text, audio, photographic, and/or video data to emergency personnel.